


we’re gonna have to put a bell on you or something

by Scientia_Fantasia



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blind Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Jack has PTSD, M/M, Pre-Overwatch, fuckyouitiveness, idk what this timeline is but afaik neither does anyone else, jack and gabe say fuck a lot, tried not to make the whole Blind thing too angsty but not sure how well i did there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 14:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10766277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scientia_Fantasia/pseuds/Scientia_Fantasia
Summary: The story of how Jack Morrison lost his sight and got it back, with some kisses thrown in for good measure.





	we’re gonna have to put a bell on you or something

**Author's Note:**

> just to clarify, jack and gabe arent in a relationship at the beginning of this, i just like to think that toxic masculinity is dead in the future and cuddling with your bro after he has a nightmare and talking about big feelings is just a thing you can do

Y’know, their bi-weekly injections of “enhancement” serum were never fun, but this one just took the _fucking_ cake.

Gabe had gotten away with puking his guts out once or twice, and was dismissed to their quarters with some nausea medication and a gatorade. Meanwhile, about a half hour after Jack’s shots, he started getting a little side effect that he could only really describe as the sensation of shoving burning hot knives into his eye sockets and _twisting_.

He was sitting at his desk trying to make his way through a book he’d read fifty times over when the pain ramped up from irritating to nauseating to fuck-off black-out maddening in the space of a minute. He’d barely registered knocking his head against his desk when he keeled over, blunt fingernails centimeters away from his screwed-shut eyes as he managed to have the sense of mind to _not_ claw them out because it wouldn’t have helped--but god, if it would have, his eyes would have been fucking gone.

He didn’t hear or see him or even remember it clearly but Gabe must have figured out something was wrong (Jack’d be worried if he _didn’t_ ) and half-carried him back to medical.

Later, Gabe would tell him the story, about how he was sure Jack was going to drop dead at any second. All he remembered himself was after they’d injected him with what was supposedly a painkiller. It must have been, because he started being more aware of what was happening, but that wasn’t exactly an improvement. Blacking out would have been preferable to what seemed like an eternity of being poked and stuck and scanned while his head was splitting in two and every time they forced him to open his eyes it was like staring into the sun, before the doctors declared there wasn’t anything wrong with him, from what they could see (“Bull _shit_ ,” Gabe had defended him, but what could they do?), and laid him down in one of those mint-green hospital beds in the corner, wired him up, and finally pumped enough painkillers into him that he passed out.

When he woke up the next morning (afternoon? Evening?), he couldn’t see.

It was pretty obvious where he was. He could hear the shuffling of the doctors and the beeping of a heart monitor and feel the wires stuck to his skin and the IV taped to his wrist, it smelled too sterile and the air was always dry--but he couldn’t see anything.

He sat up, slowly, head heavy with whatever drugs he’d been given, tender with the all too vivid memory of the pain he felt before he’d gone out. Part of him wanted to ask someone to turn on the lights--but that couldn’t have been it. It was never dark in this part of the compound.

He brought his hands to his face, resting his fingers against his eyelids as he moved his eyes, looking around, blinking, feeling them shift under his skin.

“Jack?”

He jumped, startled. He realized a half second later that it was Gabe’s voice, slow and groggy from either sleep or lack of it.

“Gabe?” he said, trying to look towards where his voice came from, but already losing track. “What time is it?”

He was silent for a moment, probably making some face. “Its four in the morning,” he answered. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I can't see.”

Gabe shifted next to him.

“What do you mean you can't see?”

“I mean I can't fucking see,” he answered, his shaking voice betraying his panic. He heard Gabe move, again, and then nothing for a long moment.

Something touched his nose, and he jumped back, instinctively batting whatever it was away and ending up with an awkward grip on the side of Gabe’s hand.

“Jesus. You can't see.”

“No shit!”

He couldn't do anything but lash out, his heart pounding in his chest, darkness and helplessness grating against his years of military experience.

“I'm gonna get someone to look at you,” Gabe told him, and walked off, leaving him staring into nothing.

That was the beginning of a week of tests, of being pushed around labs and stuck with needles--not much different than the rest of the enhancement program, except his off hours were spent sitting in a bed doing the equivalent of staring at a wall. A wall he couldn’t even see. And the doctors and nurses pushed him around like he was some kind of idiot. Not that they’d ever behaved any other way, really, but his ego was a bit fragile in the face of what was going on.

Gabe came by sometimes, but Jack wasn't the best of company. He was too stuck in his own head.

On his last day camping out in medical, they’d unhooked him from all the monitors and gave him something halfway presentable to change into (he assumed. Not like he could tell) before leading him down a few hallways into a room he was convinced he’d never been in before. He was sat down at a table and something heavy was placed in front of him.

“Jack Morrison,” said a voice across from him, in a tone of voice he’d only ever heard from the legal division around there. “In front of you is a contract detailing your exit from the Soldier Enhancement Program.”

His blood ran cold as they went through a list of benefits and compensation, then the much longer confidentiality agreement and its consequences.

The item on the table--a tablet, and a thin stylus--were pushed closer to him when the spiel ended.

He sat up straight, staring into the nothing in front of him.

“And if I don’t sign it?”

There was a brief shuffling of fabric.

“Then you will still be under the contractual obligations you took on upon volunteering for this program.”

“In other words, I can choose to continue.”

“That...isn’t advised.”

“Right,” went Jack, crossing his arms. “I think this conversation is over.” He pointed a finger over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows. “Is there anyone standing at the door behind me? Because I do need someone to take me back to my room.” It was the first time he’d asked anyone to help him with so much fuckyouitiveness, and he felt damn proud of it.

Someone stepped over next to him, and he stood up.

“ _Thank_ you.”

\----

The first thing he did when he got back to his room was climb into his bed and bury his face in a pillow that didn’t smell like the sickening sterility of medical. Then he toed his boots off.

“They told me you were leaving,” came Gabe’s voice from the top bunk.

Jack tried to pretend he hadn’t just jumped halfway out of his own skin.

“Well,” he said, taking a deep breath. “They told you wrong.”

Gabe laughed, and it was the best thing Jack had heard all week. “You’re fucking crazy, Morrison.”

“Hey, I came this far.” _I haven’t died yet_ , being the underlying meaning. Not all of the recruits had been so lucky.

“Yeah, see how you feel about that when we’re doing accuracy tests next week.”

Shit. Well, he’d deal with that when he dealt with that.

“We’re gonna have to put a bell on you or something,” he said instead of responding to that comment, rolling over onto his back. “I didn’t know you were in here and it scared the shit out of me.”

The bed creaked as Gabe shifted, and the location of his voice indicated he’d hung his head over the edge of the bunk to look at Jack.

“You sound like you're in a good mood,” he said, questioning.

“I’m just pissed off enough to be.”

Gabe laughed, again, and climbed off the bed, feet hitting the ground with a heavy _thunk_ as he jumped most of the way.

“You want to come to the gym with me?”

Jack shrugged. “Might as well.”

\----

No one really knew what the enhancement drugs were going to do. They knew what they _wanted_ them to do, but the entire program was one big, desperate experiment. So most of what the recruits did all day was show up to different parts of the facility, perform tasks, and let people with clipboards write some numbers down. Otherwise, there was the cafeteria, a rec room, a gym, cable--they were all pretty much stuck in the compound most of the time, but other than that, it was a pretty sweet deal. It sure beat the conditions out on the field.

Well, besides the blindness. And you could still drop down dead at any second.

The point was, one of the things they liked to keep track of was the recruits’ firearm accuracy.

The white coat that day didn’t know what to do with a blind man.

They put a gun in his hand.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Jack mumbled to himself, stretching his arms out to feel the walls on either side of him and try to center himself as well as he could. The mechanics of it all were muscle memory now, at least. So he prayed, aimed, and fired.

He shot his five bullets, and then set the gun down, taking off his headset. Immediately, he realized that he’d attracted an audience. The shuffling and snickering behind him belonged to more than just a few people.

“Yeah, I think he got away,” came Gabe’s voice, before a hand landed on his shoulder.

This was bullshit.

\----

He stepped over the still twitching body of one of his squadmates, boots leaving footprints of blood on the concrete. He ducked behind cover, rifle tucked against his side. Something was wrong with his eyes--something...he was alone. No. Heavy, mechanical footsteps echoed in the alleys around him. He lifted his gun, aiming it at something invisible in the street. It was getting closer, but he didn’t know where. It--

The barrel of a gun pressed to his forehead, and pain exploded through him.

He gasped, and opened his eyes to the blackness of his own bedroom, legs suddenly enveloped in a too-thin blanket that he kicked at and squirmed out of in his panic, falling off the edge of the bed and landing neatly on his hip and elbow.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hissed, curling in on himself. The pain, real and tangible this time, pulled him out of the worst of it, but the darkness around him was still conjuring images from the dream. The humming and occasional thunk of the air conditioner, the coldness of the floor--he couldn’t look around and shake himself of the feeling that an Omnic was lurking behind him, ready to riddle him with bullets at the slightest movement.

There was a creak of metal behind him, and he shut his eyes, for what good it would do.

“ _Jack?”_ came Gabe’s voice, groggy. “Are you fucking going blind again?”

“Fuck off,” he answered, weakly.

Gabe climbed down the side of the bed, progress slow, and then walked over to Jack, who finally made himself stand up, not willing to let himself be seen cowering on the floor.

“Seriously,” said Gabe, putting his hands on Jack’s arms as if he needed steadying. Then again, maybe he did. “What’s up? Do you need to go to medical?”

“No.” He ran a hand through his hair, scowling. “Just...nightmares.”

“Omnics?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t help that I wake up to...” he waved a hand in front of his face. One of Gabe’s hands ran up and down his arm, placating.

“Well, there aren’t any killer robots here. Unless you want me to put our laptops out in the hallway.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Jack responded, without any real feeling, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. Come here.”

Gabe led Jack to his bed and flopped over, hitting the mattress heavily. Jack crawled in after him, carefully, rearranging their limbs in the space only big enough for one and a half of them until he finally settled, head resting on Gabe’s chest, almost breathing easily again.

Gabe yawned, and pulled the blanket up over both of them.

Jack couldn’t make himself close his eyes.

“Gabe.”

“Hm?”

“Am I ever going to see again?”

He heard him take a deep breath, chest rising under his ear.

“No. Probably not.”

“Yeah,” went Jack. That was the honest answer. There was no cure for blindness, and even if there was, people had bigger things to worry about these days. “Then what was the fucking point of all this, then?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I’m just glad you’re not dead.”

He grabbed a fistful of the blanket, scowling. That’s right--he was one of the lucky ones. Then why did he wish he _wasn’t_?

“You’re probably never going out in the field again,” Gabe continued, matter-of-factually. “But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a point to this. We still need good people watching our backs, and I know I’d always rather have someone sending me out who knows what the fuck they’re talking about. You can still be a hero, Jack. Don’t give up just because you won’t be the one putting bullets in people’s heads.”

He stared off into nothing, working that phrase between his teeth. _You can still be a hero_. That was it, wasn’t it? He didn’t care about anyone else, he just wanted the glory for himself. If he wasn’t out there, there were dozens of other people who could replace him.

He wasn’t sure that made him feel any better. But he decided to get what few hours of sleep he could.

\----

The next round of injections were the second worst he’d ever had--he was fine, but he waited around for hours for agony that would never come, sore the next day from tension he didn’t realize he’d been carrying.

The round after that, he got pulled into one of those special side rooms. This one was an offshoot of medical, at least, and didn’t imply an uncomfortable conversation with a lawyer--though once the conversation got started, he was pretty sure that’s who he was talking to.

“Morrison,” they said. “Our engineers have been working on a technology that may be able to simulate sight for you.”

Jack frowned. “ _Simulate_ sight?”

There was a pause. Then--”Yes. There have been experiments with it in the past. Most people report awareness of their surroundings, but not quite the return of what they could see before.”

“Huh,” went Jack. “Tell me more.”

\----

‘More’ was half a headset, made up of a mechanical mound that sat on his left ear and an eyepiece that curled around to the front of his face. The eyepiece tracked where his eye was pointed. The bulk at his ear recorded the scene in front of him, camera matched to his eye movement, and encoded the image data into some kind of electric signal that was transmitted into his skin at every time interval. Apparently, after enough training with the device, his brain would learn to interpret those signals as a kind of ‘image’ and be able to recognize what he was seeing.

In short, ‘more’ was some robocop bullshit and still being blind for the foreseeable (ha!) future.

And an annoying tingling at the side of his head.

He thanked Gabe as he set down a plate of food in front of him, along with a glass of water. A burger and fries, if Gabe could be trusted--Jack preferred finger food those days. It was easier to tell if he was out of it.

“That thing looks pretty ridiculous,” Gabe said, sitting down across from him.

“Yeah, well. One of the benefits of being blind.”

“So, what, you have to wear it everywhere now?”

“Basically.”

He shrugged, and ate a fry. Mushy as always.

He didn’t have much hope for the thing, but he was neck-deep in experimental technology already. Might as well give it a shot.

\----

Now, in addition to his schedule of menial tests, he also had to go in for software updates every week. It made his skin crawl with how much he felt like a machine, but he tried not to let it bother him. There was no point in eschewing technology just because one group of bots had gone rogue.

What he couldn’t ignore, though, was the fact that he still couldn’t see. Week after week of wearing this thing, only taking it off to sleep and shower, waiting with baited breath to see some kind of shimmer in his vision, to know that it was working...

His acceptance of being blind was suddenly interrupted with a glint of hope, and at this point he was kind of wishing it hadn’t been.

“It’s just--fuck,” he growled, pacing around his room, already having kicked away anything that connected with his boot. He couldn’t even talk about it, because he was acutely aware that going over his frustrations in any detail would cause his facade of anger to fall away and leave him confronting the fact that he was _scared_ , and he’d already had his scheduled breakdown for the month. “This is. I just. I just wish it _worked_.”

“They said it would take time,” Gabe said, voice flat, the tapping at his laptop keyboard continuing.

“I’m tired of waiting!”

The tapping stopped. The chair rolled back as Gabe got up, walked over, and--

Jack threw his arm in front of his face, and blocked Gabe’s fist, catching it against his forearm.

He blinked, uselessly.

“What the fuck!”

“What? I would have pulled it.”

“You’d...” He grinned, laughter rising up as he realized what had just happened. He’d blocked a punch. He’d blocked it--which meant _he knew that it was coming_. “You’d punch a blind man?”

“I’d punch _you_ , yeah.”

“You piece of shit!”

He threw a punch without much feeling in it, and was surprised at the delight he felt when Gabe dodged it, and he knew, he just _knew_ somehow that he’d strafed left. Gabe threw another punch, Jack dodged, crouched low and tackled him onto the ground, and they tussled for a few minutes before Jack got Gabe in a choke hold and he finally pounded his hand on the ground, giving up.

Jack let him go, and fell over on his back, catching his breath, staring at the ceiling and trying to connect the ambient noises with the tingling at the side of his head.

“Looks like it's working,” Gabe said. Jack looked over at him, and knew he was grinning--though that was obvious enough from his voice.

Jack rolled over and kissed him.

Gabe made a noise, half surprised but mostly--Jack dearly hoped--pleased.

He moved away, shifting up onto his elbows.

“I can't tell what kind of face you're making,” Jack said, not doing too well at hiding his nerves.

“The kind that means ‘took you long enough, Morrison,’ ” was the answer, and Gabe grabbed him by his collar to pull him back down into another kiss. Jack laid down on him, and they kissed, and shifted, trying to find the right angle until finally he just took his headset off, setting it on the floor so they could continue their languid pace, Jack cupping Gabe’s jaw as Gabe’s hands found their place at Jack’s waist.

Jack smiled, and trailed his kisses off, placing a few on the side of Gabe’s face and his jaw before setting his head down on his shoulder, just breathing.

“Took me long enough?” he said, on the edge of laughing. “You could have made the first move, you know.”

“And take advantage of a poor blind man?”

“Ugh.” He rolled his eyes, and sat up, looking down at Gabe. It was weird, trying to see without the headset on. He hadn’t realized how much of a difference it was making.

“What're you looking at me like that for?”

“Oh, is that where you are?”

He grinned, and replaced his headset, adjusting it against his ear. If he thought about it, he could tell vaguely where things were. The bed to his left, Gabe staring up at him.

“This is weird,” he mumbled, messing with the eyepiece.

Gabe frowned. “What’s weird?”

“This,” he said, tapping the plastic. “Not us. You're right, that was a pretty long time coming.”

Gabe let out a breath. “Okay. Good.”

\----

It was an exciting day for their engineers when Jack reported that he'd actually kind of figured out how this whole second sight thing was working. Though it did mean more fucking tests, he had to admit he was almost as excited as they were, even at things as simple as identifying which card they were holding in front of his face. Reading was still a bit difficult, honestly, with how much his new sight relied on what felt more like intuition than anything. But he had hope he’d get better at it.

Besides, there were benefits to digital sight. Namely that they could fit him with a camera that could see frequencies of light that humans couldn't and install routines that lit his brain up when he had the sights of his rifle lined up right. Suddenly, his lack of sight was an asset.

Funny how things worked out when the government had already invested millions of dollars worth of research in you.

\----

They gave him another few weeks before they stuck him in the firing range again. This time he was there without the other recruits, since they wanted to give him a little more time to get used to the feel of it.

It was good that they did. His first round was atrocious. Scattered fire, nowhere near the center of the target.

He took a breath, and tried again, focusing more on this new sense he had. Yes--there it was. It was like...like finally picking a lock. That sudden moment of clarity and triumph.

He fired, and the bullet shot straight through the center of the target.

“Jesus,” he breathed.

He could get used to this.

\----

\---

\--

A lifetime later, a ghost wandered, hand-to-wall, into Winston’s lab, Athena quiet as it seemed to be the one thing left on Earth that could recognize him.

He heard the exact moment he was noticed, Winston yelping in surprise, dropping something that hit the ground with a solid _thunk_.

“You’re--!”

He pulled the cracked, defunct headset out of his pocket, and laid it out on the desk.

“ _Fix it_.”


End file.
